NextEra $NEE Energy is in advanced talks to acquire Dominion $D Energy in a mostly stock transaction valued at about $66 billion, according to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg.
A mostly stock deal would create one of the largest power companies in the U.S. and give NextEra a foothold in Virginia's data center corridor
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NextEra $NEE Energy is in advanced talks to acquire Dominion $D Energy in a mostly stock transaction valued at about $66 billion, according to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg.
Under the proposed structure, each outstanding Dominion share would be converted into approximately 0.8 shares of NextEra stock, implying a per-share value of around $76, according to Reuters, citing Bloomberg. Current NextEra shareholders would end up owning roughly 75% of the merged entity, with a modest cash element rounding out the consideration. Negotiators were targeting an announcement as early as Monday, though no agreement was guaranteed, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Dominion shares surged in early premarket trading Monday, rising over 11% after the deal reports circulated, according to Yahoo Finance. Friday's closing price for Dominion shares would imply a roughly 21% discount to the proposed acquisition price.
Completion of the deal would place it among the biggest purchases ever recorded in the American utility industry, according to Yahoo Finance. When debt is factored in, the merged utility's total enterprise value would reach roughly $400 billion, according to Reuters, citing the Financial Times, which first reported deal talks.
NextEra, headquartered in Florida and owner of Florida Power & Light, holds the distinction of being the country's largest power grid operator, with a market capitalization of approximately $194 billion. Dominion's retail service territory spans Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, covering roughly 4 million customers and encompassing the northern Virginia concentration of data facilities that has come to be called Data Center Alley. By the close of the 2030s, Dominion projects that the maximum electricity load on its network will be twice what it is today, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Chief executive John Ketchum has publicly labeled the current environment "America's golden age of power demand," according to The New York Times, and the company has been positioning itself accordingly — securing supply agreements with Google $GOOGL in Iowa and Meta $META in New Mexico over the past year. Gaining Dominion would extend NextEra's footprint into the Mid-Atlantic, a region that encompasses 13 states and the District of Columbia and represents the nation's largest electricity market, with some 67 million customers, according to The New York Times.
Closing the transaction would hinge on clearance from both federal authorities and individual states, with Virginia presenting a notable hurdle — Governor Abigail Spanberger has made reducing electricity costs and shifting more of the financial burden to data center operators a central policy commitment, according to The New York Times. The Energy and Policy Institute's executive director, David Pomerantz, warned that ratepayers in Virginia and South Carolina would face steeper electricity costs should regulators give the deal a green light.
The rapid expansion of AI data centers has reshaped electricity demand across the U.S., with data centers projected to consume between 9% and 17% of U.S. electricity generation by 2030. Virginia already directs about 26% of its total electricity supply to data centers, a figure that could reach as high as 59% by 2030. That demand surge has made utility consolidation an increasingly attractive strategy for power companies seeking scale.
Neither NextEra nor Dominion responded to requests for comment, according to The New York Times.
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